David Hayton examines the political culture of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, which had settled in Ireland in different ways over a long period and had differing degrees of attachment to England, and shows how its multi-faceted identity evolved.

This rich and readable history of modern Ireland covers the political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural dimensions of the country's development from the origins of the Irish Question to the present day. In this edition, a new introductory chapter covers the period prior to Union and a new concluding chapter takes Ireland into the twenty-first century. All material has as been substantially revised and updated to reflect more recent scholarship as well as developments during the eventful years since the previous edition. The text is richly supplemented with maps, photographs, and an extensive bibliography. There is no comparable brief, multidimensional history of modern Ireland.

This volume addresses the political, cultural and economic dimensions of Irish life, presenting Ireland as a hybrid of cultures and peoples. Coverage includes: an explanation of how the literature and folklore reflect the desire for national independence in both political and cultural forms; an analysis of how the Gaelic, Norman English, Elizabethan English, Ulster Planter English, Scots, Cromwellian English and Williamite English conflict and meld into the present character of Ireland and the Irish; a discussion of how the English impact, Catholicism, the Land Question, emigration, literacy and Gaelic cultural nationalism coalesce to create Irish nationalism; emphasis on the influence of British presence on Irish values and personality; an examination of how the Irish question moved Britain in the direction of liberal democracy and the welfare state; and an exploration of Ireland as a paradigm case of a country fighting imperialism and colonialism to move from colony to nation state, accomplishing the latter through one of the 20th century's most notable guerrilla wars of liberation.

A sweeping history of all the places the Irish went when they left Ireland by one of the best known Irish historians in the world.

This rich and readable history of modern Ireland covers the political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural dimensions of the country's development from the origins of the Irish Question to the present day. In this edition, a new introductory chapter covers the period prior to Union and a new concluding chapter takes Ireland into the twenty-first century. All material has as been substantially revised and updated to reflect more recent scholarship as well as developments during the eventful years since the previous edition. The text is richly supplemented with maps, photographs, and an extensive bibliography. There is no comparable brief, multidimensional history of modern Ireland.

Spenser's Irish Experience is the first sustained critical work to argue that Edmund Spenser's perception and fragmented representation of Ireland shadows the whole narrative of his major work, The Faerie Queene, traditionally regarded as one of the finest achievements of the English Renaissance. The poem has often been read in specifically English contexts but, as Hadfield argues, demands to be read in terms of England's expanding colonial hegemony within the British Isles and the ensuing fear that such national ambition would actually lead to the destruction of England's post-Reformation legacy. Spenser should be seen less as an English writer and more as a new English writer in Ireland, his prose and poetry expressing the hopes and fears of his class. Where A View of the Present State of Ireland attempts to provide a violent political solution to England's Irish problem, The Faerie Queene exposes the apocalyptic fear that there may be no solution at all. The book contains an analysis of Spenser's life on the Munster plantation, readings of the political rhetoric and antiquarian discourse of A View of the Present State of Ireland, and three chapters which argue the case that the apparently Anglocentric allegory of The Faerie Queene reveals a land gradually—but clearly—transformed into its Irish other. Spenser emerges from this study as a writer whose experience in Ireland rendered him implacably opposed to the vacillations of his English monarch.